LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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The Dignity of the 
Common School Teacher's Mission. 



AN ADDRESS 

Delivered before the Minnesota Educational Association 
Dec. 29, 1891. 



BY / 

^ / 

REV. SMITH BAKER, D. D. 



//^36a 



MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. 

SCHOOL EDUCATION COMPANY. 

1S92. 



Copyright 1892. 
School Education Company. 



THE DIGNITY OF THE COMMON SCHOOL 
TEACHEE'S MISSION. 



BY REV. SMITH BAKER, D. D. 



To a New England born man there are few more 
pleasant memories which come like dreams of the past 
to fill with pictures of delight his conscious hours, than 
those of the country school house where he first en- 
tered the humble paths which have led to all his 
after years of culture. It was entering a new form 
of life. The house itself had an unspeakable mystery 
and sacredness. The first teacher was like no other 
woman, the first master like no other man. They 
woke up or covered up the budding desires of the 
mind. 

And then the boys and the girls who went with us, 
played with us, recited with us, sat with us upon the 
hard benches, read with us, spelled and mispelled 
with us, went to the head and then, to the foot, fired 
paper balls with us, whispered with us, sat on the 
"easy seat" with us, snow pelted with us, slid down hill 
with us, went to spelling school with us, walked home 
with us, flirted with us and exchanged notes and ap- 
ples with us, in all the joyousness of country purity. 



Do boys and girls have so good a time now as we 
used to have around that old one-story brick school- 
house which for sixty years has been the little wicket 
gate through which the children have entered the 
temple of education? God bless the old New Eng- 
land school house ! God bless the common school 
house everywhere ! It is the poor boys friend and the 
nation's hope. 

Some of you remember when you first became a 
school-master in one of those old New England towns, 
thirty-five or forty years ago. That first school you 
taught! What a school it was! I remember mine, 
because of the coincidence of a certain number. I 
was sixteen years old; the school was sixteen miles 
from my home; there were sixteen families in the 
district — the school was sixteen weeks long and I had 
sixteen dollars per month for teaching it. I boarded 
around two da3'S to a scholar and the largest num- 
ber of children from any one family was eight, so 
that the longest time I boarded at any one place v/as 
sixteen days, and there was in the family a sixteen 
year old Yankee girl. How hard I worked. It was 
a good school, the best I ever taught. I remember 
caUing at the close of the first week upon an old sea- 
captain who had six children in the school and in the 
presence of all his family — he said "Master, how do 



the children behave?" I told him "finely." "Wall,'' 
said he, "If they don't, don't you whip them. Don't 
you whip them. You maul them !" They were splen- 
did scholars. 

The old New Englano country village school was 
an institution very peculiar. School committees and 
supervisors did not govern as they now do, but they 
turned the master Hke a gladiator into a den of young 
animals as much as to say — "Now handle them if you 
can!" I recollect engaging one such school and 
when I went before the committee to be examined, 
the first question was: "If you were at the north 
pole which way would you go to go north ?" and the 
second question was — How are your muscles? and 
when I answered, they were in a fair condition, the 
reply was "That will do, go in and we will pay the 
damages." For the first two days we had some old 
fashion g^^mnastic exercises, not with stuffed sand 
bags but with real Yankee muscle, and after that it 
was lovely for twelve weeks, for there was a nobility 
about the roughest of those farmer boys and they 
respected the master when he was master, as every- 
body does, and they despised the master when he is 
only a "sissy" as ever3'body should. 

I call your attention this evening to 



THE DIGNITY OF THE COMMON SCHOOL TEACHER S 
MISSION. 

This thought refers both to the effect of the work 
upon the teacher and its results upon the state. Our 
idea of any work gives quality to our methods and 
character to its fruits. The commonness of our com- 
mon schools like the commonness of all our most 
essential and greatest blessings causes the unthinking 
mind to forget their high value and true dignity. 
How much any work is to us or the community, from 
the blacking of boots to the presiding over a nation 
depends upon our ideas of its importance and high- 
ness. Some street sweepers make their work more 
honorable than some bank presidents do theirs. 
Some auctioneers make their office more noble than 
some ministers because they bring into it all the best 
of their manhood. Some primary teachers exalt 
and dignify their A, B, C, instructions more than 
some college presidents do theirs because they do 
their foundation work with higher ideas of its im- 
portance. 

To bring out all the beautiful possibilities of the 
smallest lily is greater work than to retard the growth 
of a mountain oak. To make a beautiful image from 
a piece of lead is nobler work than to disfigure an 
image of gold. To awaken thought in the dullest 



mind, is an hundred times higher achievement than 
to merely hear a genius memorize. When the uni- 
versity professor only hears a student recite he is 
doing a small work compared with the country sum- 
mer school teacher who makes a boy feel he must 
go to college. To awaken thought is higher work 
than to teach facts. 

Too much of what has been called an education 
has been the stuffing of the mind as our mothers used 
to stuff the thanksgiving-goose and the result has 
been about the same. A loaded memory is not true 
culture. The gift of memorizing and the power to 
think are not the same, hence the boys who pass the 
best examination when they graduate frequently 
make the weakest men. To hear boys and girls 
recite is not teaching them. Cramming is not de- 
velopment. A school should not be a mental candle 
mold but a garden where each mind shall reveal its 
own individuality; hence the art of teaching is as im- 
portant as a knowledge of what is to be taught. An 
half educated teacher who knows how to do his work 
is worth more than learned dullness. 

Not can you pass an examination but can you wake 
up the pupils mind. This is the first thought in the 
dignity of the common school teachers work. She 
has not one special pupil to whom she can devote her 



energies, whose mental tendencies she can study and 
who taking by the hand, she can lead alone in some 
single path up the hill side of mental development, or 
has she like the college professor a select few whose 
minds have been turned into the same path and who 
have a common interest in one special study. But 
she has every form of m-ental tendency from all 
varieties of social life w^ho come to her without 
awakened minds or an intelligent choice of what they 
wish to learn and with only the dimest idea of what 
it means to study but who are there because they 
are required to come. Not images like the col- 
lege student, half-formed to be polished but the uncut 
blocks of marble in which she is to find an image. 

This is the greatness of the common schoolteachers 
art, that she is to discover and awaken possibilities 
for some one else to culture. She cannot be a spe- 
cialist with one mind, or one kind of mind, or one 
branch of study, but she must have the genius of 
teaching and be able to sweep the whole key board 
of mental tendencies. 

Excuse the illustration when I say that preaching 
is the highest art of speaking, for while the lawyer 
at the bar has twelve men at near the same age to 
whom he speaks on a special*theme, and the senator 
has a body of his peers whom he addresses, and the 



politician has an audience of men, citizens witli liim- 
self, and the scientific lecturer has a special theme and 
a picked audience with a common interest, the 
preacher has all classes, the old and young, the cul- 
tured and ignorant, the sad and the happy, the good 
and the bad all in one place and he is to preach to 
them all at the same time, hence the preacher's art is 
the highest of all speaking arts and it requires more 
of a man to make a good preacher than to be any 
other kind of a speaker. 

So, because the common school teacher begins at 
the beginning, takes her pupils in the rough arid un- 
sought variety and must discover the tendencies and 
aptitudes of each one, yea, because she must adapt 
her individuality to fifty other individualities at the 
same time, and be fifty teachers at once, it requires 
more genius to be a good common school teacher, 
than to be any college professor in the world. This 
its dignity, that it gives scope for the best brain, the 
best heart and quickest invention. 

The dignit}' of the common school teacher is also 
in the superior importance of her work to the State. 
We do not undervalue the work of the college and 
the university. As civilization deepens and broadens, 
they will multiply in number and expand in their 
facilities. The higher culture must ever reach to 



that which is still higher. "The reading of God's 
thoughts over after Him," — out in all directions up 
among the stars, from world to world, and system to 
system throughout limitless space, down into the 
earth, unlocking her mysteries, m3^stery inside of mys- 
tery until the greatness of littleness is as wonderful 
as the vastness of immensity. The contem_plation of 
the laws of human thought as real as the laws of the 
rocks and trees and higher and deeper and more 
mysterious — the relation of man to man in all that 
pertains to the home, the state and the nation. The 
ethical, moral and spiritual questions all ending in the 
mystery of God himself, yea, the whole universe of 
facts and truth and laws, whose morning light seems 
to be just dawning upon the thinking world, these 
all make our higher institutions of learning as nec- 
essary watch towers where men shall stand and note 
the onward march of God's plans in nature, mind 
and grace and where men shall be fitted to lead their 
fellow men up the hill sides and on to the mountain 
peaks of human knowledge and revealed truth. 

Let the nation, the state and church found and en- 
dow these universities and colleges, that the poorest 
boy and girl shall have an open path to the highest 
development of all the powers God has given them 
and let every youth in the land be encouraged to the 



9 

fullest improvement of the highest opportunities pos- 
sible and I have no doubt the time will come when 
as the result of statesmanly forethought, individual 
philanthropy and Christian consecration, our land will 
lead the world in the number and character of her 
universities and colleges and the opportunity for the 
broadest culture. 

We rejoice in all this, still it remains true, that more 
important than all these are the common schools. 
We could afford to abolish our state universities but 
could not afford to abolish our common schools. These 
are at the foundation. They are the foundation in 
two respects : ( i ) The number and quality of stu- 
dents who avail themselves of the higher education, 
depends upon the character of the teaching in the 
common schools. They are the feeders. Good 
teaching awakens an ambition for more education. 
Good works always leadi to better works. Good 
farming to better farming, good art to higher art, 
good common school education creates a thirst for 
higher education. Good teaching opens the Mdn- 
dows of the soul to gleams of greater light beyond. 
The beginning of most boys ambition for the col- 
lege was not at the college but from some teacher in 
the common school or academy who woke up his 
mind, to see that life is more than living, that know- 



10 

ledge is power. Give us better common schools and 
our colleges will be crowded. (2) The common 
school is the foundation, because the safety, strength 
and prosperity of a republic depends, not upon the 
higher education of few but the common inteUigence 
of the masses. As efficient and popular as our higher 
institutions may be, nineteen-twentieths of our peo- 
ple will never enter them but will graduate from the 
common and the high school and, these nineteen- 
twentieths will not only comprise the great body of 
our so-called working people but the majority of our 
business men, merchants and contractors, bankers 
and officers in the city, town, state and church. In 
a democracy the common people rule. Every man 
and in the time to come, every woman also will be a 
politician. How intelligent, how broad minded, nine- 
teen-twentieths of our voters shall be depends upon 
the character of our common schools. 

New England's broad solid intelligence in the past 
has not depended upon her Harvard or her Yale, 
noble as their work has been, but upon the high 
character of her common schools, scattered upon her 
hill sides, where her boys and girls learned to think, 
and her farmers and carpenters and shoemakers had 
a broad level of intelligence which demagogues could 
not lead blindfold — yea, to-day, not Harvard governs 



11 

New England, but her common school house?. 

So it ever must be in a free state and a free church. 
Their strength must rest upon the high average intel- 
ligence of the common people. You must heat your 
water by building 3'our fire at the bottom. You 
must educate your nation by good schools for the 
common people. 

This, then, the dignity of the mission of the com- 
mon school teacher; that she is at work upon the 
foundations, and helping more to decide the charac- 
ter of the future state than any other secular teacher. 

It is a matter of profoundest gratitude when such 
a man as Mark Hopkins or the honored president of 
our own State University is giving directions to the 
closing school years of our educated young men and 
young women, but it is a matter of more importance 
and greater gratitiide when one thousand men and 
women are shaping aright the opening tendencies of 
a hundred thousand bo3^s and girls. It may be an 
humble school house on a back road, but in it may 
be a boy whom you should start for college or for 
the presidency. 

The greatness of Ole Bull's art was, not that he 
could take his perfect violin and make other artists 
listen but that he could take a ragged boy's cracked 
fiddle and make the street urchins cry at his music. 



So the greatness and dignity of the teacher's mission 
is seen in how much she can wake up of the slum- 
bering immortality of the common child. Hers is 
not to polish diamonds but to find them. Hers, not 
to finish cultivation but to open its doors. She is the 
John the Baptist of teaching, and our Lord said that 
of Spiritual teachers none were greater than John 
the Baptist. So of secular instructors none are 
greater than the faithful common school teacher. 

I once asked an old sailor why he did not send his 
boys to school. He replied that they did not have 
'■'•hm-ning enough to get an education with.'''' The 
glory of the American common school system is that 
any poorest boy and girl shall have education enough 
to go on learning. He shall have that greatest of 
all opportunities, a common school education which 
shall be a key with which he can unlock for himself 
any department of learning made for the human mind. 

We must remember that in a land like ours the edu- 
cated and cultured men and women are not confined 
to our universities but are to be found among the 
common school and high school graduates who have 
kept on "reading God's thoughts over after 
Him," reading for themselves, seeing for them- 
selves, hearing for themselves, and thinking 
for themselves, expanding their minds, and hearts 



13 

by a continued contact with nature, men and God. 

It is pedantic conceit which speaks of education 
and culture limited to those who have had the advant- 
ages of the higher courses of study. Humanit}^ asks 
snot where did a man graduate, but what does he know 
— what does he think, what can he do. It makes 
one indignant to hear certain veneered minds speak 
of Abraham Lincoln, as an uneducated man. When 
the truth is, that for clearness of mental perception, 
for breadth of observation, for logical thinking, for 
accuracy of expression, for depth of comprehension 
and height of vision, in all that comes from an ex- 
panded, rounded and elevated mind not one univer- 
sity man in five thousand was his equal. He was an 
illustration of the opportunity, possibility and dignity 
of our common school w^ork in its humblest form. 

(3) The dignity of the common school teachers 
mission includes its reflex influence upon the teacher. 
All true work lifts the worker more than the worker 
lifts the w^ork. Every great picture has done more 
for the soul of the artist than for any other thousand 
souls. 

Powers' Greek Slave developed the soul of Powers 
more than the matchless statue developed any other 
soul. A great singer b}'' her singing quickens her 
own nature more than she stirs any other heart. 



14 

Every great speaker moves and thrills himself more 
than he blesses any of his hearers. When any work 
becomes incarnate in us, then its greatest result is 
upon ourselves. Any work one does which does 
not make more of a man of him is either DOor work 
or poorly done. 

Boot-blacking done with heart and brain develops 
the manhood. Intelligent farming develops the 
farmer more than it develops the farm. There is 
no small work when one sees the interrogation points 
hanging all about it. Motherhood most develops 
womanhood, because it touches with its greatness 
and duties every part of woman's nature. It cultures 
not only the mother but the woman more than the 
mother. When one sinks his manhood in his work, 
then he is a poor workman. The minister whose 
preaching does not expand his manhood more than 
it expands the minister is a poor minister. The min- 
ister who is only a minister is a cheap minister. So 
with a carpenter unless making houses makes more 
of a man of him he is only a machine. Thus good 
teachmg teaches the teacher more than it teaches 
the pupils. It develops the teacher more than it de- 
velops the scholar. Every good work is worthy 
being done without pay because of its results upon 
him who does it. 



15 

Nothing great was ever done for wages, no great 
song or picture was ever written or painted for money. 
They were the overflows of souls who must work 
out v/hat God was working in them. A teacher who 
simply hears children recite, will grow less of a man 
or woman until he withers into a machine, like a cir- 
cus clown or a magic lantern lecturer, repeating the 
same performance, but the living teacher though he 
remain in the same humble school for a generation, 
will, like a tree grow broader and higher and deeper 
each year. His teaching will expand his manhood. 

Teaching is not a service for the state but an op- 
portunity to reveal how much of thinking, inventing 
manhood and womanhood there is in one. And, as 
all merely mechanical work, rises in dignity in pro- 
portion as it taxes the ingenuity of the worker. As 
to make a watch brings out the powers more than to 
dig a ditch, so teaching rises in dignity above all 
other secular work, in that to lead the commonest child 
into the commonest branches of education calls into 
exercise and develops the highest faculties of the soul. 
Teaching is drawing out, and no artist when he sits 
down at some great organ has half so great an op- 
portunity not only to draw out the possibilities of the 
organ but the music in his own soul as the common- 
est teacher in the commonest school house has to 



16 

draw out the possibilities of a dozen children and re- 
veal the powers of her own mind. Yes, that which 
most lifts the worker, is the most dignified of work. 
(4) The dignity of the common school teacher's 
mission is seen also in the opportunity which it gives of 
impressing one's own individuality upon others.. 
This is the greatness of the poet» the singer, the ora- 
tor, the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the com- 
mon mechanic and greatest of all, of the teacher. 
To impress one's own idea of truth of nature, of life 
upon another is the most God-like mission given to* 
man. To have others the clay and we the potter, 
to have others the rough marble and we the sculp- 
tors, to have others the many — stringed instruments 
and we the soul-inspired artists — such the high call- 
ing of every common school teacher. This is not 
mere sentiment or poetry but earnest truth — that a 
teacher's power is in his or her individuahty. In 
this respect the teacher is creative. He rises from 
the mere carpenter to the architect — from the com- 
mon dauber of paint to the portrait maker — from the 
imitator to the inventor. He may teach only the same 
old common rules of arithmetic and grammar but it: 
will be new teaching. He may not be so fine a. 
scholar, may not know as much but he will teach, 
better. It is not eccentricity but individuality with- 



17 

out which learning is tame, teaching is dull; but with 
which common truths are clothed in beaut3\ 

We all remember such teachers. They became 
our ideals — we remember them because with the 
most of us two or three teachers have made us what 
we are. The others only heard us recite our lessons, 
we have forgotten them, but we recollect after almost 
fifty years, the face, the voice of the primary teacher 
who made spelling a delight and reading a pleasure 
and somehow made us love the school. I presume she 
knew less than some others but somehow it seemed 
as though hat — dog — cat^ meant more with her than 
with any one else and when we came to words of 
two, three and four syllables, why, what music she 
put into them. It seemed as though there was music 
in them because she was a born teacher. Her work 
was an incarnation in her life. 

And then you remember when you were in that 
betwixt and between condition out of the common 
school and in the high school, fitting for college, you 
had teacher and teachers who heard you recite, but 
you have forgotten all, save some one, who helped 
you find the sweet oyster in the hard shell of the 
Latin grammar. He helped you find your own 
brains — taught you how to use them and make study 
a new thing to you. 



18 

The iji'eat work of the teacher is not to hear les- 
sons but to wake up the pupils' powers, and this 
skill of mental leadership is more than scholarship — 
it is the personalities of the teacher. Arnold of 
Rugby, Mark Hopkins of Williams, were no riper 
scholars or better men than thousands of others, but 
they were not imitators. They had an individu- 
ality of method which lifted their pupils as an artist 
lifts us by the dignity of their own consecrated per- 
sonality. 

Lastly, the dignity of the common schoolteacher's 
mission is in its unconscious character building. It 
mayseem difficult to discriminate between individu- 
ality and character but in the sense now used indi- 
viduality refers more to one's method and character, 
to what one is; both form and personality of the 
teacher. A rose has both color and fragrance. In- 
dividuality is the light, character is the heat. It is 
the unconscious influence of the truth incarnate in 
the individual. It is that which gives power to all 
culture, to all methods and all individuality. It is 
what one is. 

I am not speaking as a preacher but as a fellow 
teacher. The principle thing is realness to be what 
we would have our pupils be. Nowhere else is af- 
fectation more useless, powerless or repulsive than in 



19 

the school-room. To be in the presence of some 
teachers is an education. A repulsive teacher is a 
poor teacher. A teacher whose silent example, man- 
ners, temper or spirit awakens unpleasant or evil 
thoughts, is a failure. A sarcastic, patronizing, nar- 
row, partial and unkind teacher should never be al- 
lowed in a school. A teacher who will twit a dull 
boy of his dullness should be sent to the reform 
school. The teacher is an object lesson which the 
child, the youth, and the young man reads. 

Some of you have stood before some great master 
painting; perhaps it was Raphael's Virgin and the 
child. How it stirred your soul with an idea of pure, 
living, loving character. 

Every teacher is a picture — eyes are following her; 
she is silently imparting ideas of hfe. Every teacher 
should be such a man as we want our boys to be, 
such a woman as we want our girls to be. No teacher 
can help being a character builder. What he is im- 
parts itself to others. The teacher of my bo}^ is do- 
ing more for my boy by what he is than by what he 
says. 

There can be no greater thought than this, that I 
am the ideal of manhood or womanhood to others; 
that I am the most important book they study. It is 
fearful — it is grand — it gives dignity to the humblest 



20 

teachers work, it makes of any common school house 
a temple into which one feels like entering with un- 
covered head as in the presence of the unseen, for 
there God's images are being cultured and trained. 
God is making of our land a great seething pot of 
humanity into which he is melting into the recogni- 
tion of Christian manhood all nations. It is the most 
magnificent experiment in the world's history. Can 
the races be Americanized? The common school 
house where rich and poor, white and black, Yan- 
kee, Irishman, Dutchman, Frenchman, German, 
Swede, Italian and Chinaman, Jew and Greek, Pro- 
testant and Catholic all meet in the artless democracy 
of children must answer the question and we have 
no fear. All hail, the American common school house ! 
Allhail the American common school teachers! They 
are the vanguard of the world. 



T^HIS address is published in an eight page 
Extra of School Education which we can 
mail at these very low prices: 

One to ten copies, ... each, 2c. 

Twenty copies, 35c. 

Thirty copies, - - - • - - 50c. 

Forty copies, 65c. 

Fifty copies, 75c. 

One hundred copies, ... $1.00 

Money must accompany order. Postage stamps will be accepted. 



ADDRESS THE PUBLISHERS, 



SCHOOL EDUGftTION CO., 

807 N. Y. Life. IVlimrieapolis, IVIinn. 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



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